Category Archives: Podcasts 2025

In the Shadows of Utopia Season 2, Episode 17 Death from above 1969: Operation Menu and Nixon’s Madman Theory President Lyndon Johnson announced that he would not stand for re-election on 31 March 1968. This brought the Rolling Thunder campaign to a close, but the bombing was to continue for five years longer. The $2bn price tag of Operation Menu had sucked out all the money that LBJ hoped to devote to the Great Society, which could only proceed with an increase in taxation. Back in Cambodia, Sihanouk began talks with the United States, sparked by Jackie Kennedy’s visit, because the Communists were not stopping the Khmer Rouge. Sihanouk threw himself into his film career, writing and starring in ‘Shadow over Angkor’ in 1968. Perhaps this was just escapism, or maybe he was trying to portray himself as being Khmer above all. The economy was stagnant and corrupt so he opened up casinos, and the Phnom Penh casino was soon contributing 9% of the country’s income. Education was increasing, but the link between urban and rural life was being hollowed out, leading to general dissatisfaction. The Civil War continued into 1968, with the armed struggle in the provinces providing a way of training up soldiers, but the government’s response was brutal. The Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) had more success in the north-east, where Pol Pot was, and in the south west. The CPK now had peasants and students, thus integrating both town and country. Sihanouk launched a raid against the CPK and with the arrest of members, he realized the networked nature of the party, but he explained this as being an example of Vietnamese infiltration. By September 1968 there were at least 9 large Viet Cong bases in Cambodia, with 6000 Viet Cong soldiers on Cambodian soil at any one time.

Meanwhile, Nixon (or at least his representatives) went behind the peace talks, suggesting to the South Vietnamese that the Republicans would offer them a better deal, should the Republicans win. From the US missile crisis, the South Vietnamese took the lesson of standing firm- they didn’t know about the side deal with Turkey that enabled the missile crisis to be defused. Meanwhile, there was a top secret bombing of the COSVN (the North Vietnamese) headquarters in Cambodia by B52s (not even the head of the Air Force knew about it), then there was a shift to carpet bombing. Holding the “madman” theory, Nixon gambled on the fact that he had nuclear weapons and could do anything to intimidate the North Vietnamese. The ‘menu bombing’ (i.e. Operation Breakfast, Operation Lunch, Operation Dinner, Operation Dessert) was not the cause of Pol Pot’s rise, and the numbers killed were not as much as popularly believed. Sihanouk did not approve of the bombing, but he didn’t ask for the carpet bombing to stop either.

Journey Through Time Episode 49 The Paris Commune: France Wages War On Its Own (episode 4) Bismarck released 60,000 Prisoners of War, which the French government at Versailles was able to turn against Paris. Now the Civil War was official, with the French government fighting against its own capital. Starting May 21 1871, 130,000 government troops commenced “the bloody week”. The Commundards had no defence plan, and in Houseman’s newly designed Paris, revolutionaries were not able to barricade themselves in the narrow streets as they had in the past. What they did have was too little, too late. The government troops slowly and methodically took Paris, with mass executions targetting working class areas. Government buildings were fired, and the city was ablaze, with the Louvre saved by rain. Women, dubbed ‘petroleuse’ were blamed. The Commune was crushed, with wide scale arrests, summary trials and the establishment of prison camps. By 1880, the Communards were amnestied and allowed to return. One of the female ringleaders, Louise Michel, was sent to New Caledonia, then ended up lecturing in London. The Commune was soon mythologized, but the sense of bitterness towards Prussia (Germany) underpinned the harsh conditions imposed by the Versailles Treaty, where Clemenceau, who had much anti-Prussian feeling through his earlier involvement with the Commune, was one of the architects.

The Philosopher’s Zone Innocence and ‘child rescue’ in the colonial imagination. This episode was first aired on 16 March 2025. It features historian Joanne Faulkner, the author of Representing Aboriginal Childhood: The Politics of Memory and Forgetting in Australia. She talks about the treatment of the ‘street arab’ children of the London streets, who were scooped up by Christian philanthropists, including Thomas John Barnardo, who used photography as a way of staging ‘before’ and ‘after’ photographs to garner donations for his children’s homes. She then extends this discussion to the depiction of indigenous children in Australia, who were rendered in a ‘piccaninny’ style in photographs and household objects, to be rescued by the colonizer. Children were depicted outside the context of their own birth family and society, as ‘waifs’ like the London street children.

The Rest is History Episode 579 The Irish War of Independence: Showdown in London (Part 4) This episode looks at the Anglo-Irish Treaty, signed in December 1921. “Deals” are all the go with Donald Trump, and this episode reveals the intransigence and craftiness of ‘deal-makers’, in this case Lloyd George. David Lloyd George was a Welshman, from a non-conformist background (although he personally lost his faith). He despised Catholics, and as a Welshman couldn’t understand why Ireland objected so much to the United Kingdom. He was radical and charismatic, but he was dependent on the Conservatives (who were protestant and anti-catholic) to maintain his position. For some reason, Éamon de Valera refused to go to London to negotiate the treaty, sending instead a team including Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith, with instructions not to sign anything without checking with him first. But Lloyd George was a masterful negotiator who separated out Collins and Griffith from the rest and dealt with them individually, and Griffith was too quick to sign a document of agreement made as part of this separate negotiation. The ‘deal’ they came up is encapsulated in the border which lasts till today, and Lloyd George came out the winner, achieving his two ‘red lines’ of maintaining the unity of the empire, and devising a solution that was acceptable to the Conservatives on whom his government depended. De Valera was furious, especially over the oath that had been agreed to, and walked out when the deal was backed by the unofficial Irish government. On 14 April 1922 the armed IRA occupied the Four Courts in a challenge to the Collins/Griffith government.

Shadows of Utopia Tet Part 2: the My Lai Massacre This long episode doesn’t start with My Lai but instead with the village of Ha My on 25 February 1968, a few weeks before the My Lai massacre. By this time, the fighting was petering out, and the NLF flag had been taken down at Hue. A troop of soldiers, mainly South Korean but also with Australian and Thai soldiers called a meeting of the villagers to be addressed by the South Korean commander. The villagers, mainly women, old men and children, gathered hoping to receive some of the lollies that the US-aligned troops handed out. 135 villagers were shot.

By the time My Lai occurred, Westmoreland was confident of victory. There were 500,000 US troops in Vietnam, mostly draftees. They had a 12 month stint there, which Lachlan Peters emphasizes as it was too short to gain any real expertise or experience, and there was a constant churn of men eager to do their time and get home. My Lai was in a ‘free fire’ zone, where ‘shoot first, ask questions later’ was the modus operandi. Charlie Company was led by William Calley, who had benefitted from the churn of personnel to be promoted beyond his modest abilities. The troops were not trained in how to deal with civilians and non-combatants. On 16 March 1968 he led over five hours of pandemonium, arriving at 7.30 in the morning and killing between 350-500 villagers by lunchtime. The divisions had been split up from each other, but there was no attack on them by the Viet Cong. There was an immediate coverup. There’s not many heroes here, but one was helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson who challenged Calley, rescued the few people he could, and reported the action to his superiors. He received a Distinguished Flying Cross, but threw it away.

Lachlan then embarks on a (long) reflection on why the My Lai massacre occurred.

NY Times The Daily Parenting a Trans Kid in Trump’s America. A policy which might (and that’s a big ‘might’) seem acceptable on the face of it can be challenged when it comes down to an individual person and their family. This podcast features two parents, both ministers in Christian churches in the South, who become increasingly conscious of their child’s unhappiness as she (they use the preferred pronoun ‘she’) approaches puberty. To give some breathing space for their child Allie to make up her mind, they begin to search for puberty-blocking hormones, only to find the options becoming increasingly narrowed as Trump’s policies on trans people take effect. Even moving to a ‘blue’ state sees the options dry up, out of fear of penalty and retribution.

Witness History (BBC) The Father of E-Books In 1971 Michael Hart had access to an ARPANet computer at a university for one week. He typed the Declaration of Independence into the computer and emailed it on to the 100 people who had access to the network. This was the genesis for his plan to make the world’s literature available online, starting with 100 books, then going on to the next 100. Project Gutenberg was born!